He looked for a drink to give her but all he could find was three empty whisky bottles and a half-drunk bottle of seco and he decided on his own authority that seco was not the answer. So he led her to a wicker chair and sat her in it, found some matches, lit the gas and put a saucepan of water on the flames, and when he turned and looked at her he saw that her eyes had found Mickie again, so he went to the bedroom and took the coverlet from the bed and put it over Mickie’s head, smelling for the first time the warm rusty smell of his blood above the cordite and cooking smells and fire smoke that was rolling in from the verandah while the fireworks went on popping and whizzing in the square, and the girls screamed at the bangers that the boys held onto till the absolute last moment before chucking them at their feet. It was all there for Pendel and Ana to watch any time they wanted, they only had to lift their heads from Mickie and look out of the French windows to see the fun.
‘Get him away from here,’ she blurted from her wicker chair. And much, much louder: ‘My father will kill me. Get him out. He’s a British spy. They said so. So are you.’
‘Be quiet,’ Pendel told her, surprising himself.
And suddenly Harry Pendel changed. He was not a different man but himself at last, a man possessed and filled with his own strength. In one glorious ray of revelation he saw beyond melancholy, death and passivity to a grand validation of his life as an artist, an act of symmetry and defiance, vengeance and reconciliation, a majestic leap into a realm where all the spoiling limitations of reality are swept away by the larger truth of the creator’s dream.
And some intimation of Pendel’s resurrection must have communicated itself to Ana, because after a few sips of coffee she put down her cup and joined him in his ministrations: first to fill the basin with water and pour disinfectant into it, then to track down a broom, a squeegee mop, rolls of kitchen paper, dishcloths, detergent and a scrubbing brush, then to light a candle and place it low down so that its flame would not be visible from the square, where a fresh display of fireworks, fired this time into the air and not at passing gringos, was announcing the successful selection of a beauty queen – and there she was on her float with her white mantilla, her white pear-flower crown, her white shoulders and blazing proud eyes, a girl of such candescent beauty and excitement that first Ana and then Pendel paused in their labours to watch her pass with her retinue of princesses and prancing boys and enough flowers for a thousand funerals for Mickie.
Then back to work, scrubbing and slopping till the disinfected water in the handbasin was black in the half light, and had to be replaced and then replaced again, but Ana toiled with the goodwill Mickie always said she had – a good sport, he always said, as insatiable in bed as in a restaurant, and soon the scrubbing and the slopping became a catharsis for her and she was chattering away as blithely as if Mickie had just sidled out for a moment to fetch another bottle or have a quick Scotch with a neighbour on one of the lighted verandahs either side of them, where groups of revellers were this minute clap-ping and cheering at the beauty queen – and not lying face down in the middle of the floor with the bedspread over him and his arse in the air, and his hand still stretched towards the gun that Pendel had, unnoticed by Ana, slipped into a drawer for later use.
‘Look, look, it’s the Minister,’ Ana said, all chat.
A group of grand men in white panabrisas had arrived at the centre of the square, surrounded by other men in black glasses. That’s how I’ll do it, Pendel was thinking. I’ll be official like them.
‘We’ll need bandages. Look for a first aid box,’ he said.